A colleague of mine brought me his borked personal laptop the other day. I was to determine that the hard drive had failed, causing a fair amount of data loss, but otherwise all seemed ok with the rest of the laptop. On the face of it, simple enough - replace the 2.5 inch SATA drive and reinstall Vista. Ha! I hadn't counted on corportate shitbags Toshiba, from whom I will never knowingly purchase another component.
The lappy came without any Vista disks, just a self restoring program on a separate partition of the hard disk drive, which of course was failing due to the disk corruption. At this stage I phoned Toshiba to see if I could get a replacement Vista disk from them. I ended up dealing with some strategically shaved chimp who told me that, as the customer hadn't taken any backups, we would need to purchase a restore disk for 30 squids. Well, that did it. Off to the Pirate Bay to get something that my colleague had actually paid for and had a license for already. (And via about 30 rootkit scanner sites too for post-install)!
My thoughts on this are threefold. Firstly, fuck Toshiba (and any other vendors who do pull this kind of underhand shit). The person to whom the laptop belongs is a little clueless, but this is just taking the piss. Secondly, always check before you purchase a Windows machine that you are getting a full Windows install disk in case you have to replace your hard drive. Otherwise you are going to end up paying another £30 odd for something you already thought you owned. And finally, at least there are alternatives and thank Cliff* I haven't had to use Windows in my personal or professional life for some years now.
* ref, The Young Ones
The lappy came without any Vista disks, just a self restoring program on a separate partition of the hard disk drive, which of course was failing due to the disk corruption. At this stage I phoned Toshiba to see if I could get a replacement Vista disk from them. I ended up dealing with some strategically shaved chimp who told me that, as the customer hadn't taken any backups, we would need to purchase a restore disk for 30 squids. Well, that did it. Off to the Pirate Bay to get something that my colleague had actually paid for and had a license for already. (And via about 30 rootkit scanner sites too for post-install)!
My thoughts on this are threefold. Firstly, fuck Toshiba (and any other vendors who do pull this kind of underhand shit). The person to whom the laptop belongs is a little clueless, but this is just taking the piss. Secondly, always check before you purchase a Windows machine that you are getting a full Windows install disk in case you have to replace your hard drive. Otherwise you are going to end up paying another £30 odd for something you already thought you owned. And finally, at least there are alternatives and thank Cliff* I haven't had to use Windows in my personal or professional life for some years now.
* ref, The Young Ones
